Dining Room Table Turnover

Our dining room table was the first big purchase we made when we bought our house. Let's be honest , we like to eat so we knew we'd be spending a lot of time around the table. We've always wanted a BIG table to host the holidays. As Tim would say "fit for a king".
We ended up looking at several furniture stores but decided to go with this table from World Market. It wasn't exactly the color we wanted because it does have a red undertone but at the time "farmhouse" tables weren't super popular just yet , options were limited.

Long story short we bought it , have loved it but over the last few months as we have been renovating, I've been looking to purchase a new dining table , something similar just less warm.
Re-staining the table never crossed my mind , because it has a veneer top, until the other night when I was painting my nails on the table and accidentally put the paper towel that had fingernail polish remover on it on the table. Of course, when I went to throw the paper towel away it ate through the stain on the table top. Then all of a sudden when I saw the 'bare" wood veneer a little light bulb went off and I googled "can you sand and stain veneer". The answer was YES and that is all I needed.

The next morning I went to Menard's , bought some sand paper and started sanding away... I mean like for the next day and half. Sanding is never "fun" but it honestly wasn't to bad. When sanding veneer you want to be very careful not to go through the veneer so it didn't take much effort.

The entire turnover only cost $15. Here's the breakdown of what we used :

Sandpaper 220 - Started with this but ended up switched to get the poly off first then came back to it to smooth finish.Sandpaper 60 - Used this for the majority of the project to get the heavy polyurethane offPlastic - To protect the floor , defiantly recommend OR be smart and take your table outside to eliminate dust because there is ALOT of it.Stain - We ended up using Sunbleach by Vanathane . This was actually just going to be the first of two stains. I was originally going to go on top of this with weather gray, also by Varathane . However, we ended up loving the Sunbleached alone.Polyurathane-Two coats to seal the deal. We used satin.Stain Sponge - I used a sponge but you could also use a brush. I just wanted to try to eliminate any brush stokes that I could get from a brush.

The entire turnover took a whopping two whole days. Probably one of the easiest and quickest projects we've done to date. I couldn't be more happy with the way it turned out! Defiantly loving the restoration hardware vibes it gives now.

Feast your eyes... corny, I know. lol

Take note: Wear gloves when sanding. If not your manicure won't we the only thing that gets messed up. I ended up sanding my thumb along with the table.

Sheek -Saver Tip: Less is more , than enough. We only used half of this 8 oz can for the entire table. Although we did only do one coat , if we had done two we still would have had enough!

Vanathane | Sunbleached

I do plan on sanding the chairs with a 220 grit and washing a light coat of the stain over them to take out some of the yellow. Now that the table is "cooler" I also am wanting new flooring even more. Look out for that soon!